5e Character Creation Redux

After last nights exhaustive (and exhausting) walk through, I tried my hand at creating another D&D Next character.  While Foobar Testface was a pretty straightforward concept and execution, I decided for my next candidate to be a bit more creative.  To that end, I went full Willow on the character creation rules, creating a Neutral Evil Hafling Wizard Spy Necromancer, who I've yet to name but am currently referring to as 'Bad Hobbit'.

This time, I played with the standard stat array (8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15) rather than going for random rolls.  I also ignored the RAW for play test character creation and assigned my attributes right from the get-go, rather than waiting until after my Racial and Class abilities were ready to plug in.

Observations:

• Human attribute bonuses seem even more OP after running through the character creation process with a non-human.  +1 to every single attribute AND +2 to your primary attribute seems like a bonanza, particularly if you're someone who likes well-rounded characters.  With attributes getting more attention than ever with D&D Next (thanks to the apparent decline in importance of skills & skill ranks), this really feels like an obligatory feature if you are at all interested in optimizing a character.
• Halfling racial abilities all seemed to fit the theme of the race quite well.  I'm pleased to see the return of some mechanical benefits for sub-races, but the Halfling race bonuses do seem to push them solidly in the direction of Rogue being their best class, and them being the best Rogues.  That's OK, as long as the playing field is relatively level for everyone else, and they aren't head-and-shoulders above the rest of the gang.
• Halfling weapon dice scaling salves the bitter wounds left by weapon shrinkage in 3.5e.  Hoping that other Small races (like my beloved Gnomes and Goblins) get comparable qualities to keep them competent at hand-to-hand, but not holding my breath.
• Creating a Wizard gave me some much harder choices to make compared with the Warlock I built yesterday.  While the Warlock Invocations were fairly easy to pick (and there weren't many of them), I spent a fair bit of time thinking about situational uses for my spells and minor spells.  I quite missed having a larger range of cantrips to choose from that I could plug into 0-level slots instead of a fixed pool of at-will spells.  I've often found uses for Mage Hands over the years, but felt like Light and Detect Magic were obligatory utility spells and that I needed an offensive at-will (like Magic Missile) to round out the selection instead of relying on my sling skills (though the sling does have a nice +6 to hit and 1d6 damage).  I kind of hope Detect Magic eventually gets baked into something like a Magical Lore check- it's such a universally used spell that requiring every character to have it starts to feel like a spell tax, or like you have fewer spells than you are told.
• Building on the above- the Magic-User specialty feels even more useful when faced with having to pick cantrips that you will presumably have with you forever.  Doesn't seem like (so far) there is a way to gain more later.  Again, I'd prefer the 0-level spell slots option to having this choice be permanent.
• The level 1 Necromancer benefits seem a bit weak in comparison to the other prime-time spell caster specialty, Magic-User.  At first level you have a choice of two necromantic spells (Cause Fear and Ray of Enfeeblement), which means you aren't going to often have the chance to kill something and then cast a spell within one minute.  On the other hand, it likely will scale better with higher levels than having extra cantrips- being able to blast a minion with Magic Missile in round 1 and then cast a high-level necromantic spell with advantage in round 3 could be a pretty nice combo.  Feels a bit like the nub of a 'combo point wizard' build- wonder if they will build that out further at some point.
• My Warlock from yesterday's post feels like a much bigger combat threat than my Wizard.  Getting off a Ray of Enfeeblement or a Burning Hands or two, followed by lots of Magic Missiles or sling stones seems pretty paltry compared with the Warlock's at-will 3d6 Eldritch Blast, to say nothing of his higher Hit Points and armor class and better weapon selection (again, still don't know why a Warlock would ever use a weapon).
• Regarding balance- a number of posters on the forums have noted that the Sorcerer and Warlock feel a lot more powerful than the Core 4.  Not sure whether we will see a boost to the Core 4 or a nerf to the new guys, but one of the two is bound to happen quite soon.  The disparity between the combat potential of the Warlock and the Wizard (at least at low levels) makes me wonder if WotC is trying to push the Wizard a little more into the controller role that it held in 4e, while giving the Warlock the blasting/Striker crown.  Maybe it's just a transient effect of the two classes being in different stages of review, though.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with my Bad Hobbit.  I've never played a Halfling spell caster before, and created him mostly as a laugh, but now I'm quite looking forward to the opportunity to play him for a bit.  Anyone looking for a player ;)

D&D Next Character Creation Walkthrough

As the new D&D Next play test packet is out, I thought I would walk through character creation and see what the experience was like, approaching it from a fairly newbie-ish perspective- just to see what was there, and what was left out.

Character Concept
As my character concept, I decided to play a dark but charismatic arcane type- I've previously created a similar character in Pathfinder as a Infernal bloodline Sorcerer; since Greatsword-wielding Dragonblood is the only Sorcerer archetype available in the current play test, I decided to create him as a Warlock.  In keeping with the spirit of the experiment, I named him Foobar Testface.

Attribute Generation
In honesty, its been a while since I did anything other than point-buy or standard-array a character, so I rolled for variety.  The default method recommended (4d6 drop lowest x 6, arrange to taste) produced the following array: 13, 15, 8, 14, 9, 17

Not bad.  Four above average rolls, and two below average.  I was already eyeing making that 17 my Int (since it's primary for Warlocks) and the 15 my Cha, to provide some face-like interaction potential.

Race Selection
I'd settled on Human at the concept state, so this was a non-decision.  Nevertheless, it lead to a couple of observations.

Observation 1: The Human ability score bump feels overpowered: Right off the bat, Foobar Testface went from above-average to superstar.  His starting array now stood at 14, 16, 9, 16, 10, 18.  Rather than jump straight to 19 for my primary attribute, I decided to share the love a bit and gave myself a second score of 16 for an extra bit of bonus.
Observation 2: Humans are mechanically great, but their race features are boring: Yeah, the attribute bumps are great, but once you've assigned your +2 you're done with the interesting bits.  In previous editions, Humans had fairly generic bonuses, but at least got some choice in terms of extra feats, At-will powers, or other features.  The flavor of humanity is more flavorless than ever.
Observation 3: You actually need to assign attributes before picking a class or race: The provided character creation document gets it wrong on this one, in my book.  What's the first thing you see upon looking at your class description?  An ability modifier.  But I haven't assigned my abilities yet.  For that matter, if I hadn't already kinda-sorta pre-selected which numbers went with which abilities, I couldn't really have picked where to assign my +2 attribute bonus when I picked my race.  Rather than making attribute assignment come after Race and Class selection, WotC needs to provide a little primer on how to pick attributes (for example, a table of primary attributes for each class) and take care of that before we get to the race stage.  Otherwise, character creation happens in a weird order where you pick a race, but can't apply the ability adjustments for that race until later in the game.  Character creation should be a progression, not a process of flipping back and forth between chapters and hoping you haven't forgotten anything.

Class Selection
I'd decided to make Testface a Warlock from the outset, so I flipped to the Warlock chapter of the demo files to take a look at my Warlock abilities.  As I describe in Observation 3 above, I hit a snag here in that I was given the option of boosting an attribute by my class abilities, but hadn't put numbers to attributes yet.  I decided to ignore WotC's instructions at this point, and select abilities in order to facilitate writing down my class abilities.

Here's Foobar Testface's attributes, after class adjustment: Str 9, Dex 14, Con 16, Int 19, Wis 10, Cha 16

Observation 4: Class ability adjustment + race ability adjustment = superman: I chose to create a more well-rounded character, but at this point I could have had a starting Int of 20 if I wanted.  Using the starting array rather than random rolls, I would have been guaranteed an 18 in my primary attribute as a Human.  The max roll possible is now the default for Human members of that class.  Not sure what the implications of that are yet, but it implies a certain amount of built-in min-max-i- ness.  I'm not so naive as to think that a lot of (if not most) PC's were starting out with that 18 in their prime attribute before, but it does reflect a change.
Observation 5: Order of operations: The Character Creation document doesn't have me figuring up my starting HP and other combat numbers until later, but if you look at your Class description you get hit with formulas for this sort of thing immediately, which you need to then flip back for when you finalize your numbers and calculate your bonuses.  Which are on a chart several chapters back.  The order of events and sequence of pages and chapters you move through really needs to be streamlined, and maybe re-thought.  Why are starting HP calculations with each individual class, rather than at the end of the chapter when you are calculating HP?  We've always done this with starting money, but not HP.  Why not put the attribute bonus table at the end of the Class/Character Creation chapter, if your attributes are not going to get their final values until after you've picked your class?  Things get particularly lost when you get to the Class phase of character creation.  As a Warlock, when do I need to pick my invocations?  How do I record my boons- 2 per whatever unit time?  There is a whole ton of stuff to record, and it isn't clear where to put it, or, from a new players perspective, how much of it needs to be recorded at once.
Observation 6: Pact Benefits Need Names:  They just do.  I need to be able to reference an ability rather than writing the whole thing down.
Observation 7: Character sheet weirdness:  In general, I found the process of adding my class abilities to Foobar Testface needlessly complicated.  It wasn't clear where to record things on the character sheet, and how much detail was needed.  Things didn't have names.  There is a whole big huge chunk of text on my sheet for 'Race' and 'Class', and I'm not sure how it is meant to be different from the Racial Benefits and the Class Benefits section.  I don't have any Race benefits as a human worth noting, anyway, since they are all recorded elsewhere, so I would rather just have a big blank 'Class and Race Abilities' section that I could use for whatever I wanted.
Observation 8: Warlock balance:  Eldritch blast feels overpowered to me, in comparison to things like Sneak Attack or Magic Missile.  Automatic 3d6 from 50' away, uses the Warlock's Magic Base Attack Bonus (which is equal to the Melee Attack Bonus of a Fighter), doesn't require advantage, and never runs out of ammo.  At level 1, I ended up with a +7 attack that does 3d6 at-will.  Seems a little bit much.  Meanwhile, Breath of Night seems under powered as an expenditure of one of your two daily (or interval-ly) boons, particularly compared with something like Shadow Veil that can be used without spending a boon.

I left the class section feeling like I would need to come back again later and finish filling things in, and make sure I hadn't forgotten anything.

Background Selection
I didn't really have a clear idea of a background for Foobar, so I looked through the various packages available.  I ended up selecting Charlatan, as I felt like that tied in well with his social skills.
Observation 8: Here a skill, there a skill:  More of a knock on the character sheet, I guess, but there is no single place on the provided sheet to note all of your skill training.  Mr. Testface has three skills from his background, plus another skill from his class.  I'm guessing Races could also provide skill training.  That's three different places to look for your skill modifiers.  Make a 'Skills' section in a future character sheet, please.
Observation 9: Unskilled: It feels like D&D Next characters are trained in fewer skills, or more narrow skills, than in earlier editions.  3e characters had a number of different skills (assuming they weren't Fighters), and 4e skills covered a lot of territory.  Play test characters feel like they have a very narrow range of skill competency- maybe higher ability scores are meant to compensate?  Feels like there are fewer ways to customize a character and reflect their specific skill focuses compared to 3e or Pathfinder, and that the skills that they do have just aren't as valuable as they were in 4e.

Specialty Selection
Specialties are currently Feat-bags of sorts, pending the release of a full Feat system.  Some of the Specialties look great, because they can apply to a lot of different classes- Archer and Dual Wielder, for instance, could work for a Fighter, a Rogue, a Ranger, a Paladin, etc., depending on your focus.  The suggested Specialty for Warlock is Magic User, which adds the ability to cast a couple minor Wizard spells at level 1, and then adds the Find Familiar ability at level 3.  Necromancer was intriguing to me, since I've always loved the idea of having undead minions, but the level 1 ability is entirely useless for a Warlock; since there are no Necromantic Warlock spells for Foobar Testface to cast at level 1, I can either select something useless to me right now and for the foreseeable future in the hope of eventually getting a cool skeleton buddy, or take something useful right now and give up being able to progress towards having an undead minion.  I decided to suck it up and take Magic User.
Observation 10: Limited Specialties:  We really need more specialties available in order to judge how useful they are going to be.  There are really limited options right now that are of use to multiple classes.  While being a Rogue who can cast two minor Wizard spells may be kind of cool, I see most people just taking the Specialty package that 'matches' their class.  Some Specialty features- like familiars and having a fighting style- feel like they should be 'baked in' to classes like Wizard or Fighter or Ranger.

Assigning Attributes
If you hadn't already assigned attributes by now, you would need to go back and pick up your racial adjustments and class adjustments.  Don't see anyone who has played the game before doing that- the order of events needs to be revised.

Combat Numbers
Lots of flipping back to earlier sections here.  Also, though you're prompted to calculate your Armor Class here, you're not choosing equipment until later in the process.

Other Observations:

• Healer's kits are dead cheap.  Why wouldn't everyone have one, making the Herbalist level 1 benefit kind of redundant?
• Formatting on the character sheet is screwy- I got a lot of E's that look like 'F's because they are too low on the line.
• Why would a Warlock bother carrying weapons?  'Eldritch Blast' seems to be the answer to every question.
• Really liking the idea of making spells into rituals and using the Ritual Component Pouch.  Strikes a nice balance in terms of not needing to prepare as many 'what if' spells for Vancian casters, and adds some point to spell components without needing to count pinches of bat guano individually.
• Non-savable PDF forms suck.  A lot.  Make the form savable if you're going to make it fillable.
• No good place on the character sheet to note your melee attack bonus independent of what weapon you are using.  Might be handy if your character picks up a weapon at random- most of what I've equipped in the 'Attack' section so far were finesse weapons that used my Dex bonus + melee attack.
• Lot of empty space on my character sheet right now.  On the sample characters, the writers wrote out a lot of description for each ability.  I'm not going to do that.  I'm going to write down some bare bones facts (uses per day/rest, range, damage, attack bonus, etc.) and a page number reference.
• Can't fill out the name field on the character sheet PDF.
• Seems to be some inconsistency between calling cantrips cantrips and calling them 'minor spells'.  I guess because of orisons.  It would be nice to just standardize things- call them 'minor arcane' and 'minor divine' spells.  Whenever I see 'orison', I have to mentally change it to 'cleric cantrip'.
• Changing abilities from 'per day' to 'and then they are restored when you take a long rest' is really verbose.  We need a shorter way to say that.
• Hard to really make too many judgement about the Warlock or Sorcerer classes without more Bloodlines/Pacts available.  Ideally that should end up as a really important choice for your PC, but right now every member of that class looks the same.
• Some of the Specialties feel like they ought to be class options- Lurker jumps out as one that feels more comparable to Thief and Thug than to anything else.

5e feels familiar

I've had the 5th Edition (or D&D Next! or New D&D, or whatever they're calling it) playtest docs in my hands for about as long as anyone else.  Haven't actually played with it yet, but a few scattered impressions:

• Reminds me a lot of second edition AD&D.  This is very nostalgic for me, personally, because 2nd ed. AD&D was what was out and what I was playing when I got into roleplaying games.
• The OSR seems to have won the day.  Wizards is still claiming that the final version of the game will support styles of play that accommodate people who like the 4e style of play, but what they're giving people as their first taste of the game looks as little like 4e as 4e looked like 3rd edition.  Instead, we get something that looks like the style of game TSR published 20 years ago, with a few modernish tweaks.
• That being said, I know that AD&D 2nd Edition is where things really "went wrong" in the minds of some OSR purists (growth of tons of player options that unbalanced the game, endless supplements and official settings, added "realism", novel tie-ins, the Dragonlance "game is story" railroad, etc.).
• Based on looking over the book and the character sheet, I can see teaching someone 5e who was new to gaming.  It seems like a single character sheet actually contains enough information to give a newbie a reasonable idea of how to run their character.  I don't feel like I can say the same about 3e or 4e.  4e seemed to cater to kids who grew up with the Magic-style "cards are powers" paradigm, but not everyone who comes to an RPG is going to know collectible card games.
• Waiting for character creation rules to see how far back we're going on the race/class/level restriction stuff- will Dwarf Wizards and Elf Paladins get the heave-ho again?  Will we see the return of limited progression in non-favored classes?  Personally I hope not- I always found those things to be a pointless barrier to playing the sort of character that you want to play.
• Waiting with anxiety to see what indignity is going to be inflicted on my beloved gnomes by this new edition.  Current guess: left out of the core races for the 5e equivalent of the PBH, gain bug eyes and rock crystals instead of hair, favored class continues to be Bard, some obscure interaction between a STR penalty, size levels, and encumbrance renders them incapable of carrying both a missile weapon and sufficient ammunition for it.  You heard it here first.
• Backgrounds and themes/schemes look interesting.  Backgrounds look like an attempt to merge the old 2e Secondary Skills with the skill/proficiency system,  and Themes/Schemes hopefully prevent infinite class proliferation.  The difference between Themes and Schemes looks a bit unclear at the moment.

Read on for my take on the game as a whole and thoughts for the future.

D&D in the New York Times; also 5th Edition appears in the distance

This.  Plus, this.  I'm not sure which is more significant, that there is a new edition in the offing (which everyone knew), or that the MSM (side note: to paraphrase the Nazis, whenever I hear the word 'MSM', I reach for my earplugs) has taken note of it in an era when D&D is probably more influential but less played than ever.

As I opined earlier in response to the posts from the Escapists, I think the edition wars are over, and everyone one.  D&D is outside of WotC's control, and we'll never see the community united again the way it was during the 1e or even 2e era.  There are just going to be 5+ games going forward, probably supported more by amateurs than by big companies, and everyone is going to play a little bit of everything (or as much as they care to).

I would compare it to an oldie buy a goodie: Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age.  Before, we had The Feed: content broadcast from a point source (TSR/WotC) to a large consuming audience.  Now we have The Seed.  Everyone left who wants to play a pencil and paper RPG is fully capable of creating their own game if they want to between OGL, FUDGE, decades of back content, and free and low-cost publishing over the web and on-demand print houses.

D&D Past and Present

Great pair of articles from the Escapist about the history and current state of D&D:

• The Ghosts of D&D Past
• The State of D&D Present

My two cents:
1.  The loss of continuity- not just between the design of 3e and 4e, but between the people responsible for the two editions and the huge change of direction regarding the OGL- seems to emerge as a significant theme.  It may just be coincidence that Gary Gygax passed away during the same period- certainly, he hadn't had direct control over the game or its direction in many years- but it does seem to indicate that a sort of 'changing of the guard' has taken place in the industry, and that some of the continuity that comes from having everyone be on the same page and having started from a similar place may have gone with him.

2.  The release of 3e under the OGL may well emerge as the most significant act in the history of D&D since Gygax and Arneson released 1e.  The OGL essentially let the genie out of the bottle, and it isn't going back- the core features of the most popular system in history are out there for the world to use, and for the last 10+ years the sort of homemade rules and monsters that everyone had been making for decades became not just a fun part of the hobby, but a potential business sideline.  In the end, the OGL may be what undoes the D&D trademark as a tabletop RPG brand, while the underlying game lives on.

3. Lurking beneath all of this is profound uncertainty about the hand of Hasbro in the future of D&D.  Anyone who glances at Hasbro's corporate filings will notice that D&D really never garners a mention- WoTC seems to be small potatoes in the Hasbro world, outside the occasional mention of Magic.  Hasbro could easily decide that D&D is more valuable as a licenseable property (for movies, video games, board games, toys, and miniatures) than it is as a niche RPG product.

What a Weird World

There have been a lot of posts lately talking about the possibilities of D&D 5e- when it may come, what it may look like, who it will target, whether it will heal the world and usher in an unending age of peace and prosperity, etc., etc.  Emerging in these discussions are a couple of very different perspectives that have been with us as long as 4e has been around- one that holds that 4e basically abandoned what made D&D D&D, and another that hopes that 4e is the way that Wizards moves in the future.

This reminded me of something I was thinking of the other day, about the demographics of gaming.  I think that RPGs- and particularly, D&D- may have some of the strangest consumer demographics in the world.  D&D hits a market that is 1) almost exclusively male, 2) almost exclusively white, 3) largely above-average intelligence, and 4) seemingly roughly split between ten and twelve year olds and people in the 20's, 30's, and 40's.

There have been some polls conducted on this age group thing... the numbers, are, I think, very hard to interpret given that what we are really seeing is 'how old are the people that hang around a small number of web sites and talk shop about RPGs'.  WoTC and other gaming companies probably have more realistic numbers, but they aren't, for the moment, talking.  I can't really think of any other activity that targets the same range of ages in trying to sell products.  Video games are in a similar category, but there are decidedly video games that target younger and older games, as evidenced by the various age rating labels that the publishers employ.  There are specific games that skew older in the RPG world as well, but then you have D&D- facing on the one hand a high-turnover demographic of young gamers who will pick the game up, buy a few books, and then drop out by the time they can drive a car and on the other hand a group of often very technical-minded older players who have thirty years of history (good and bad) with a variety of products sold under the same label.

How the hell do you address that kind of demographic split?  And what are the real underlying numbers?

More D&D eBooks on the way

As reported here on GamingReport.com (it got a mention on Slashdot, too), DriveThruRPG.com has announced that Wizards of the Coast is going forward with a scheme that will eventually see almost all of the D&D library available in eBook form.

There are several interesting ramifications of a decision like this. The first thing that pops to mind for most folks is one word: ...

Piracy. It's one of the more controversial aspects of the plan to a lot of people, and doubtless part of the argument that was going on behind closed doors at WoTC. The new D&D eBooks will feature some of the same watermarking and protection technology used with the current batch of official D&D PDFs. Of course, anyone who has ever poked their head the least bit into the wild and wonderful world of file sharing knows that all of the titles that DriveThruRPG is going to be adding to its offerings are already available on the Internet through BitTorrent sites and other P2P sharing systems.

That gives consumers an interesting choice. Players and DMs who want to support WoTC's eBook scheme can now pay the same price as buying a hard copy of their books for a PDF that has fewer features than the PDF that they could get for free off of their favorite file sharing service. It's hard to say who is going to bight; while I'm sure that there are a lot of folks who would like to have electronic copies of their books in addition to their hardbacks, I doubt many of those folks want to pony up the full price of a book for the privilege. Meanwhile, the size of the market for electronic-only books seems to vary according to who you ask; some gamers are ready to go laptop-only starting yesterday, while others are pointing at their laden bookshelves and screaming "from my cold dead hands!".

Mixed into all of this is more bad news for the small hobbyist shops of the world. Rest assured, retailers don't like it when their "partners" in the publishing biz decide to cut them out of the equation. WoTC's eBook publishing scheme- which can no longer really be called an experiment- means that the nickel-and-dime counting division at WoTC has decided that the potential gains from online-only eBook sales more than offset the consequences of the bruised relationship with retailers. Wizards has the small hobbyist shop market in the worst possible position: D&D & D20 are much too big for any sane RPG retailer to ignore and kick out of the shop, meaning that retailers have little means at their disposal to show WoTC that they don't like being cut out of the equation.

Mini-reviews at Slashdot

Mini-reviews, mostly of some of the recent WOTC books, are up today at Slashdot, as well; as the usual barracking in the comments section.

The State and Future of Gaming

This entry by Gareth-Michael Skarka puts some concrete numbers from Comics & Games Retailer to the rather rickety state of the RPG industry. The numbers look, in a word, horrible. Clearly, the growth of MMORPGs and other factors are taking a big chunk out of the gaming world.

A lot of people seem to blame Wizards of the Coast and the d20 system for killing off a lot of companies in the RPG market... Wizards certainly has the strongest visibility in the RPG market, and enjoys penetration into the main-stream retail space that other publishers just can't match right now. I think as a result, Wizards has picked up more and more of the 'new gamer' market over the past several years, which has probably put the hurt on some other companies.

On the other hand, you could make the argument that really, Wizards is responsible for making the market as a whole larger than it previously was. TSR long had an edge in the 'new gamer' market that gave it a competitive advantage over the other systems. Dungeons & Dragons remains the single most recognizable name in gaming, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the d20 system and the OGL did a lot to lower the barrier to entry in the market for new publishers and new games. Potential writers no longer had to either convince an existing publisher to take a chance on them, or overcome consumers reluctance to learn a new, untried rules system. d20 meant that you could write your modules- whether it was a new setting, an expansion, an adventure, etc.- without worrying too much about the nuts and bolts of the rules. If your product made it to market, there was a large body of players and DMs that already knew and played by the same ruleset, and had a big hand up on learning or using your game. Even if your product couldn't stand on its own two feet, there was a good chance that if there was something worthwhile in it, people would be willing to buy it since it was so easy to incorporate things into other d20 games.

What I suspect happened is that this spawned a whole generation of hobbyists who thought they were going to be the next Gary Gygax, and tried to enter the traditional publishing market. The traditional publishing market, if you haven't heard, is hurting all over. Production costs are remaining high, demand and retail outlets have declined, and challenges from other media are threatening their consumer base and their bottom line. Add to that the fact that entering the publishing business involves managing issues of inventory and production that are capable of destroying even veteran players (TSR anyone?), and you have a recipe for disaster. Hundreds of new companies offering products in 1,000 different d20 lines simultaneously waded into the publishing business, unaware of what they were really getting into. It's little wonder that five years later, most of them are belly up in the tank.

The retail space has its own problems. Note that the figures that Skarka was quoting are primarily gathered by game retailers. RPGs are a perfect example of the sort of niche product that translates very well to Internet delivery- hence the 'long tail' discussion. The inevitable result is that as the number of gaming shops declines, more and more companies will go to direct sales and PDF distribution. And as more publishers make an end-run around retail distributors, more and more retailers are going to exit the business, either by going under or by deciding that it is no longer worth their time and money to be in the business of selling RPG products.

I try to support my local gaming stores on principle, but I can see a coming time when they just won't have a place in the market due to a combination of economics and redundancy. I've recently been thinking about buying the new Knights of the Grail supplement for WFRP. Now, do I buy that from Amazon for less than $20, or from a local retailer for $30+? What, really, other than instant gratification, am I getting from my local hobby shops? What are they getting from me? I do sometimes browse games in shops, and see things that I otherwise might not (though one place I shop occasionally shrink wraps all their games; very irritating), but is that really worth paying a premium for my games?

I think that gaming can survive losing the brick-and-mortar retail channel. I'm sure that retail could survive losing gaming (though it would be a hardship for some of the most dedicated retailers, which is a shame). Unless someone can come up with a more fruitful relationship for the two, they're going to have to.

Dreamblade and the 'Miniatures Cycle'

Poking around a bit today looking at the early info up on WoTC's new Dreamblade miniature game, officially announced this month at the GAMA Trade Show. I have to admit that the early pics of the figures do look neat. I've always lingered right on the fringe of... miniature games. WoTC removed one barrier for me by sticking to pre-painted (and fairly detailed) miniatures, rather than relying on my paltry painting skills, but I've still never really made the jump.

The Dreamblade announcement has me thinking a bit about the balance between miniature games and mini-less RPGs.... As most people know, RPGs developed out of mini-scale wargaming. Since then, the ties between miniature gaming and RPGs have ebbed and flowed quite a bit. Several modern games- D&D, for instance- have a fairly tight connection with a miniature line. Other games, like the World of Darkness line, have never had much to do with them. The ability to sell miniatures has been a make-or-break proposition for some games (like early v1 WFRP), and a negligible sideline for others.

The consensus seems to be that the mini business is more lucrative than text-only RPG publishing. I think at times this has created a little anxiety on the part of the RPG community as to the future of their hobby. Right now, with the popularity of miniature gaming and collectible card games (not to mention the growth of MMORPGs), it sometimes seems that traditional RPGs are in danger of being overshadowed or swept from the field by their cardstock and tin counterparts. Certainly a majority of the announcements coming out of GTS seemed to focus more on CCGs and miniature games than on RPGs.

(Unrelated note: Battlestar Galactica RPG. Please. Yes, I know about the fan projects on the web. That's not what I want. I want a well thought out and well supported, gritty, low-tech BSG roleplaying game sold in glossy thick volumes replete with pictures of the cast and sets, and tons of additional official technical details and background. I'd play it. My wife would probably even play it. And where are the neat, lavishly illustrated technical books for the new BSG series? Star Wars is rotten with them, and compared to BSG the tech in Star Wars only seems plausible if you've taken a nasty blow to the head.)

Overall though, I think that RPG fans don't have too much to worry about. I don't doubt that the popularity of CCGs and miniature games right now is taking some market- especially on the younger end- from traditional RPG products. I also don't doubt that they are stealing some focus away from roleplaying games in the development schedules of companies like WoTC and others. In the long term though, these games may be what's ensuring that there is still a strong market for RPGs ten or twenty years down the road despite the major threat to every non-electronic hobby presented by the growth in PC and console gaming (not to mention Tivo!).

Miniature games and card games have an appeal to younger gamers that traditional RPGs really can't match. First, they are generally less complicated than RPGs (as a lad, I once had a conversation in a hobby shop with a kid a few years younger who had given up on AD&D because he and his friends couldn't figure out the THAC0 rules. He also pronounced it 'taco'.). Second, despite the predictions made by Back to the Future 2, games where you get to hold something, play with something, or collect something are deeply appealing to our inner shiny-thing collecting ape self. How many roleplayers have a dice collection that looks like a desperate attempt to attract a female magpie? How else to explain the popularity (albeit brief) of pogs?

But while new gamers are likely to become attracted to card and mini games, it seems that many of them will eventually the same compulsion that led Gygax and Co to move from miniatures into actual RPGs. It becomes much less fun to spend money on collectible games when it's your cash, rather than mom and dad's. And while pushing minis around a table or stacking cards can certainly be interesting, there's no story there, and if you're interested in the world that forms the background for the game (and a lot of games seem to be creating a fairly extensive background for their CCGs and standalone miniatures), you're ultimately going to want more. In the long term, miniature and CCG markets feed RPG markets. A gamer that no longer has time or inclination to shop for and tote around miniatures may well enjoy sitting around the gaming table with some friends, some dice, and some beer.

Which leads me to believe that we can expect the announcement of a Dreamblade game from WoTC sometime in the next couple years, assuming that the line overcomes the initial risks and becomes a viable product. The background material is scant right now, so it's hard to tell if there is a full game in there or not. It's quite possible that WoTC will treat it much like Legend of the Five Rings; a supplement/expansion for an existing line (likely a psychic powers expansion for d20 Modern), combined with farming out work to another company to produce some additional supplements.

Churn, Baby, Churn

An interview with Matthew Sernett, the developer of the new Tome of Magic supplement from Wizards was posted to the official D&D site yesterday. I haven't seen the new book, and frankly everything that I've seen about it has left me lukewarm at best. This excerpt from the interview pretty much sums up my problems with this sort of supplement:

Wizards:Tome of Magic looks to be three entire concepts rolled into a single sourcebook: pact magic, shadow magic and truename magic; in fact, each section has its own layout. Essentially, are these new magical elements that can be incorporated by existing spellcasting classes and with exiting systems (core spellcasting, psionics, incarnum)? Or are these separate systems, with their own core classes?

Matthew: Each is a new system with a core class yes,...

Sernett goes on to say that all of the systems in the new book can be integrated into existing characters without bending over backwards, but doesn't offer any concrete examples of how this would work. Hmm.

When TSR brought out The Complete Psionicist back in the day, there was a whole essay in the front of the book devoted to "Why does D&D need another magic system anyway?". The author's conclusion was: "It doesn't. But this is something altogether different. We swear." They got the first part pretty much right; the second half was a bit of a punt, from where I sit.

Psionics has never settled too well into D&D, from what I've seen. The Darksun campaign setting did the best job of it, and did so by pushing psionics into the forefront of the setting. That's been pretty much the only real attempt at integrating them solidly into the core of D&D. Coverage of psionics in the present iteration of the Forgotten Realms setting has been minimal; the new Eberron setting placed most of the major psionics in the world on a yet-to-be-detailed continent, finally making a geographical divide out of the metaphorical one that has existed for years. Browse advertisements for new online or local games on the Internet, and the 'no psionics' restriction will peep out at you time and again.

The problem is that despite what The Complete Psionicist said back in the day, psionics really is just another form of magic in most D&D games. 3rd Edition made that more explicit than usual by having saves and other magical effects work identically with psionics, rather than burden down the core game with psionics-specific rules. And then the question returns: why does D&D need another magic system?

The answer: in most people's eyes, it doesn't. Learning a new system takes time and energy that most gamers have in short supply, and most of these new systems don't offer that much more bang for your considerable mental and literal bucks. In a bookstore one day, I found myself flipping through Magic of Incarnum, another book similar in flavor to the new Tome of Magic. Partway through the introductory pages, my eyes were glazing over. Chakra points? Soulmelds? Essentia? No thanks. I don't want to have to learn a whole new vocabulary just to drop a new resource into my game. And even if I did spend my time learning how to use these new systems, what would I do with them then? Most DMs have had at least one nightmare about players constantly trying to squeeze new expansions into their game, forcing furious attempts to make sure that the new system doesn't open gaping new holes in the rules or upset the delicate balance of their campaign- meaning that 'no incarnum' is soon to join 'no psionics' on the 'Most Popular Character Creation Restrictions' short list.

Wizards seems to think that there is a market for this sort of expansion. I certainly prefer it to bumping the version numbers on rule systems, but I don't think it will be finding a place on my shelf anytime soon.